The Great Hunger remembered

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The Republic of Ireland's National Famine Memorial day. Wreath Laying Ceremony. Heritage Green Park. Chicago IL. Old Saint Patrick's Church

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“A million a decade of human wrecks. Corpses lying in fever sheds. Corpses huddled on floundering decks, and shroudless dead on their rocky beds. Nerve and muscle and heart and brain, lost to Ireland – lost in vain.”

During that six-year span some two million people left Ireland to escape the hunger, while those left at home were vulnerable to death by starvation and famine-induced ailments including malnutrition, measles, tuberculosis, whooping cough and cholera. 

Skibbereen, County Cork, one of the areas affected the worst, was chosen as the host town for the inaugural National Famine Memorial Day.

On May 17, after a week of lectures, memorial walks and performances, remembrances began at O’Donovan Rossa Park, followed by a walk led by Minister for Gaeltacht Affairs Éamon Ó Cuív to Skibbereen’s Abbeystrowry Cemetery, where between 8,000 to 10,000 victims are buried in a mass grave. That night, the Skibbereen Theatre Society presented Jim Minogue’s award-winning play Flight to Grosse Île at the Town Hall.

In the days prior to the Skibbereen commemoration, Ó Cuív traveled to Canada to unveil a plaque on Grosse Île. The island, in the St. Lawrence River near Quebec City, served as a quarantine station during the worst years of the Famine years. Known locally as “L’Île des Irlandais”— The Island of the Irish— it was the first port of call for many of the Famine immigrants who survived the Atlantic crossing only to succumb to “ship’s fever.” Several thousand are buried in mass graves on the island.

Minister Ó Cuív said, “The instinct for survival, the will to live, which had seen the famine emigrants survive the calamity and the ocean crossing, must have been extraordinarily strong. It must have been one of the main factors that enabled them, and in time their children, to put down firm roots in their new countries. This determination to survive and to succeed was passed on to later generations of the Irish of the diaspora, and must have inspired them as they made their mark and reached the top in every area of the new societies in which they settled. We must ensure that the catastrophic events of the Great Famine are appropriately remembered and that the extraordinary contributions of those who emigrated, and of their many descendants abroad, are justly celebrated.” Ó Cuív remarked on the importance of using the commemoration of the Famine to raise awareness about those suffering starvation throughout the world.

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